Christian Louboutin Knockoffs sells more than five hundred thousand pairs of shoes a year, at prices ranging from three hundred and ninety-five dollars, for an espadrille, to six thousand, for a “super-platform” pump covered in thousands of crystals. The sole of each of his shoes is lacquered in a vivid, glossy red. The red soles offer the pleasure of secret knowledge to their wearer, and that of serendipity to their beholder. Like Louis XIV’s red heels, they signal a sort of sumptuary code, promising a world of glamour and privilege.
They are also a marketing gimmick that renders an otherwise indistinguishable product instantly recognizable. Elizabeth Semmelhack, the senior curator at the Bata Shoe Museum, in Toronto, told me, “Louboutin took a part of the shoe that had previously been ignored and made it not only visually interesting but commercially useful.” With flickers of telltale color, Louboutin’s shoes issue their own press releases: Oprah interviews George W. Bush, Beyoncé attends the N.B.A. All-Star Game, Carla Bruni strides into No. 10 Downing Street. Louboutin does not advertise, and he says that he does not give shoes to celebrities. (He offers them a discount.) Still, he has elicited the most frenzied attention to soles since the days of Adlai Stevenson.
People make marriage proposals in his boutiques. There is a Louboutin manicure, in which the underside of the nail is painted with scarlet polish. Last season, Racked, the shopping Web site, live-blogged the Louboutin sample sale: “9:02am: Staffers keep shifting the line location. Now we’re standing on 38th Street, like ON the street behind those big orange barriers used to designate construction zones.” On “So You Think You Can Dance,” Jennifer Lopez emerged from a giant shoe and performed a song called “Louboutins”: “Watch these red bottoms / And the back of my jeans / Watch me go, bye baby.”
Louboutin’s aesthetic is part Marie Antoinette and part the Mummers. He has covered shoes in gold studs (a recent boot brought to mind an abacus), dotted them with googly eyes (he got the idea from a greeting card), and topped them with plumes (a pointy-toed stiletto looks as if it had tussled with Tweety Bird). But, beyond adornment, what draws the eye to the Louboutin foot is its silhouette. On a shoe he made last year, a spike juts from the top of the foot like a rhinoceros horn. A parabolic pump called the Daffodil appears to have been conceived in a fun-house mirror. Louboutin is fond of protrusions and cantilevers, of big toe boxes like the prows of ships, of bulging heel cups and plunging cleavage (his décolleté is that of the toes).
One of his most popular designs is the Very Privé, a sinuous high heel with an open toe and an extreme, hidden platform. Before the Very Privé, which he first issued in 2006, Louboutin was less well known than his main competitor, Manolo Blahnik. The Very Privé was Louboutin’s iPod, its futuristic contours rendering everything that came before it fuddy-duddy. With several swoops of his pen, he had managed to make Blahnik’s princessy slingbacks look as if they were meant for ladies who spend their days eating charity lunches of chicken salad and melon balls. The Louboutin woman might order a rare hamburger. “I’ll do shoes for the lady who lunches, but it would be, like, a really nasty lunch, talking about men,” Louboutin said. “But where I draw the line, what I absolutely won’t do, is the lady who plays bridge in the afternoon!”
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